President Donald Trump regularly levels ratings-based criticism at media outlets, and his feud with MSNBC’s Morning Joe this week was no different.
“I heard poorly rated @Morning_Joe speaks badly of me (don’t watch anymore),” Trump said Thursday in a set of tweets, in which he also targeted Mika Brzezinski’s appearance. On Friday, he followed up after Brzezinski and her co-host Joe Scarborough addressed the feud on the air.
“Watched low rated @Morning_Joe for first time in long time. FAKE NEWS. He called me to stop a National Enquirer article. I said no! Bad show,” Trump said.
But Morning Joe is not low-rated. In the second quarter of 2017, the show reached an average of 997,000 total viewers in the 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. time slot, surpassing CNN’s New Day and marking its ninth straight quarter of growth, according to an NBC Universal press release on Monday.
The show’s viewer average set a quarterly record for MSNBC in the 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. period. And, specifically among viewers aged 25 to 54, Morning Joe had “MSNBC’s highest rating ever” in that time slot.
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Write to Katie Reilly at Katie.Reilly@time.com